Particularly if you mix a few of the co-op missions in with your campaign playthrough, you’ll almost always be able to take the exact loadout you want into any mission. It’d be a better system if cash weren’t handed out quite so generously. I made a full Ghost variant, decked out with non-lethal gadgets like sleeping gas grenades, sticky shocker proximity mines, and a crossbow that flings disabling darts, but there’s plenty of deadly equipment available as well. The other half is the character customization, which allows you to spend cash earned by executing stealthy tasks (like stashing enemies in dumpsters) to specialize Fisher’s gadget and weapon loadout to suit your play style. This multi-prong approach to level design is half of what makes Blacklist both a phenomenal stealth game and a smooth action one. Levels are laced with air ducts aplenty to crawl through and multiple paths to explore, all of which combine to form a sublime stealth sandbox. The forgotten Splinter Cell element of verticality is back, too, with ample ceiling-mounted pipes to shimmy along and ledges from which to dangle above bad guys – all the better to rain down a beating. Facepalming in your living room is optional.) Blacklist still has the auto-kill move, but it returns Fisher to his rightful place in the dark – though yes, there are some daytime missions. (In Conviction, scenarios like the one described above don’t happen and features include built in a win button called Mark and Execute that kills up to four enemies instantly with no stealth or aiming required. Very obviously an olive branch to hardcore series fans like me who were left dismayed by the franchise’s action-heavy pivot in 2010’s Conviction, Blacklist gets stealth right. That rush of having so many tools to choose from and the intoxicating freedom to execute a plan as I saw fit is the biggest part of what makes Splinter Cell: Blacklist the best game in the series since 2005’s Chaos Theory.

Fisher reached up, grabbed the bad guy by the shirt, and hurled him over the edge to the concrete below. Decision time: do I toss an incendiary grenade at his feet and watch the flesh cook off his bones? Tear gas him and then run up and slit his throat? Simply aim my pistol at his face and paint the wall with his brains? Nah, I’m an old-school Splinter Cell purist, so instead I tapped the X button. Hanging from a ledge on a balcony, I pressed the Back button on the Xbox 360 gamepad and grizzled superspy Sam Fisher drew an armed guard closer with a whispered a come-hither taunt.

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